A blog about digital rhetoric that asks the burning questions about electronic bureaucracy and institutional subversion on the Internet.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Bar None

You can try out Personas for yourself. As an admitted self-Googler, I might argue that the software seems to pick up less of the activism and blogging than other aggregators do, and that it shows institutional investment and coherent narratives about social roles much more. (Click to enlarge.)

Part of the artist's statement reads as follows:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.